sabato 31 luglio 2010

Mappero is back from holidays. Version 3.0+beta11 has just been released and doesn't contain any of the big features I was planning; instead, it's mostly a bugfix release, but a rather important one. Here are the main highlights:

Google routing works: direct and faster

A new widget for inputing addresses, with history-based auto-completion

I was hoping to make a gigantic release with some great improvements I had in mind, but the current situation of gnuite.com server (the routing data provider for Mappero and maemo-mapper), which lately is often not responding, forced me to hurry up and make a new release as quickly as possible.
Routing in this new version works by directly connecting to the Google Maps server (although the indirect way is still available, under the "gnuite" router option) and downloading the route as a KML file. This is much faster than the old way, because we have a few network hops less and we are not waiting for the gnuite server to process the route and rebuild it as a GPX file for us.

The other main feature introduced with this release is the address input dialog:

This dialog is invoked when clicking on the route icon and then choose the "Set destination..." item. It lists the locations you've been searching before and filters them as you type, in a similar fashion as the browser URL suggestion works.
I plan to improve it by adding suggestions retrieved via the network from Google Maps, but this will require some deeper changes in the code that might take some time.

Small request: Pre-cache of tiles for the KML route? Many times I plan a route while on wifi, and would prefer it to get the tiles while I'm still on fast wifi and cache them vs slowly over edge on the trip.

1) open the menu (by tapping on the application title)2) Maps3) Manage Maps...4) Select "Along Route - Radius (tiles)" and set the number of tiles.

Be warned that sometimes the amount of downloaded maps is huge, and downloading could freeze your device. I didn't spend time on working on the feature (as you can, the dialog also needs porting to the new maemo UI style), but it's in my roadmap (although not soon).